Tortuga AgTech

Tortuga AgTech makes autonomous fruit-harvesting robots, primarily focusing on picking strawberries with a few robots dedicated to picking grapes. My contributions included the mechanical design of 3 major subsystems of a new Model G robot, over 15 sustaining engineering projects for an existing Model F robot, and the mechanical design of a new product for UV-C treatment service.

I was part of a hardware team of less than 10 people and we prided ourselves on designing custom hardware in order to create a low cost, high performance, and scalable robot. Though we didn't always get everything right, my time there taught me a lot about mechanical design and engineering in just a few short years. 

As I grew into my role, I helped mature the mechanical design process at Tortuga by advocating for the judicious use of technical analysis to guide designs and prototyping as a means to evaluate concepts. Though it sounds obvious to be doing those things, in practice it's challenging to strike the balance between engineering rigor and meeting the impossibly short timelines of a startup.

I also led the mechanical design of a new product that dosed plants with UV-C rays as an alternative to pesticides. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available videos of this machine but you can get a sense of what the job is from the video above. The video shows Model F robots equipped with UV-C bulbs with one robot per row whereas the new product attached onto a single Model G robot and allowed it to treat up to 7 rows at once. Additionally, this product needed to be low cost and delivered quickly - we were able to design, field-test, and deliver to an international customer in 6 months and it started generating revenue shortly after.